I loved Evil Genius. I wanted to love Evil Genius 2.

It is more shiny, with better graphics, but at the expense of fun. It is a lazy game. It could have been so much, but instead the developers decided to gut the gameplay of Evil Genius and dumb it down.

You build a base. You have to progress in the story to get the research options you need, so expect plenty of remodeling once you can remove certain stones.

You can build traps. You can't set doors to certain security levels, so all your minions are stumbling through your base, even though they have no reason to be there. They don't fall into your traps, though, so that is fine. The super agents don't fall into your traps either.

You train your minions. Then you send them off to do dastardly deeds on the world map - and tell them to stay away and not come back. While EG1 had your minions come back, and some die during the mission, here your minions are mainly just a form of cash. This mission costs 6 guards, that mission costs 4 technicians. And since they are gone, you have to retrain them.

I really wanted to like the game, but I get to a certain point and then can't be arsed anymore.

In addition, there are some glaring game breaking bugs. To get a certain henchman you need to capture the RHINE burglar, who tries to sneak into your base to steal your gold. Not a problem - except he sneaks through the back entrance where I stationed a bunch of guards, and he does not survive the encounter.
Now what? Will the burglar respawn? No. Can I cancel the mission? No. Can I take another mission? No, I have to finish the current mission, which is impossible, because the guy I was supposed to capture got himself killed.
And there are several of these bugs.

Minions - minions have become more boring, and you can only have between 100 and 300. Given the vast amount of space you can create, this feels like a poor joke. Especially if you have the DLCs where you can build robots and monsters - but they are counted against your cap.

All in all, I wanted to love this game. I gave it several chances. It failed me every single time.

Honestly a bit overhated, its a pretty good sequel but the expectations where sky high.

No. This is hard for me to say being a veteran of the first. But, at some point, you have to ask how much nostalgia strings are they pulling to make a sale? If they would have just made it a little bit mod-able, they might have created an ongoing community again, but, instead they chose to go the same route Rebellion always does. They would be huge if they just did modding. No matter, this version of EG is stuck in time further back than 1 simply because it can't be modded. It's worth the $3.99 it's currently at, for a weekend adventure, maybe. I don't know. You do you. I had a couple of weekends of fun with it. But, it's not 1, and without modding, it will never be 1. My 2 cents...